West Vancouver is exploring whether to allow coach houses on single family lots to improve housing affordability and to increase the variety of housing available.

Stephen Mikicich, a West Vancouver community planner, said this “gentler form of densification” could add options to an area that has many single family homes and a few apartments, but very little in between.

Coach houses are smaller houses that share a common property with a main house on a single-family lot. Sometimes they are accessed via a laneway — in Vancouver, for example — but they can also be accessed via a common driveway or be built on top of a garage.

“We have a community that is aging, that needs different housing options. We have younger families who are having difficulty establishing themselves or remaining in West Vancouver because of the cost of housing,” Mikicich said. “At the same time, it’s a community that highly values the established character of its neighbourhoods.”

West Vancouver residents’ median age was 50 in 2011, compared to 40 in Metro Vancouver, and one-quarter of residents were age 65 or older in 2011, compared to 13 per cent in Metro Vancouver, a discussion paper on coach houses prepared by West Vancouver states.

“We’ve had ongoing community interest in the concept of coach houses — older people wanting to remain in their community, when a multi-level house no longer works, but if they could build a single-level house in their backyard and rent out their house or have their kids live in it, it may work,” Mikicich said.

“We legalized secondary suites a couple of years ago, but not everyone wants to have a suite in the house and it’s difficult to add one later.”

While many Lower Mainland cities now allow these types of houses, most communities allow them as rentals only. Mikicich said the discussion in West Vancouver will include whether they should do the same, or allow strata titles to be created.

On Wednesday evening, a panel was scheduled to discuss the idea, including Jake Fry, owner of Smallworks, which builds laneway and coach houses, and other interested individuals.

Fry said allowing infill housing would be a way to “mitigate the monster home” and encourage more families in neighbourhoods that are today full of single-family homes occupied by a lone senior citizen.

“There are no new people — the single-family model is extremely difficult for people to get in. I think it’s one way to make home ownership possible for people,” Fry said. “You may have more roofs per acre, but they’re going to be smaller roofs. They’ll probably even have less square footage per city lot, but there’s going to be more families and you’ll see the ... communities become much more dynamic.”